Thursday, November 18, 2010

My earlier post about Advanced Persistent Threats just got more interesting. Today, the Wall Street Journal confirmed that China Telecom redirected up to 15% of all of internet traffic on April 8th, 2010. The attack targeted US Government Servers, Dell, IBM, Yahoo and Microsoft.

This means that Google is not alone, since they were viciously attacked in December 2009 (see previous post). In fact, what is interesting is that so far, the only company to stand up to the Chinese has been Google. How will these companies react? Hard to tell since these kind of attacks are nearly impossible to stop, except that this attack was preventable.

So how did they do it? It was the result of changing the routing tables that are generated by network routers. As I have said in the past, the world is not a nice place and trusting all of the actors on the internet is no longer a smart business proposition. No enterprise and no government can really assume that they are not at risk from these types of attacks.

The net result of all of this is that a private, secure business network will emerge. Companies, such as the government owned China Telecom, if they keep perpetrating this kind of alleged behavior, will be blocked from conducting business outside of China.